TV transport tech, part 1: From server to sofa at the touch of a button Ah, the magic of television. With the press of a button and the twist of a knob, the residents of homes around the country could cosy up for an evening's entertainment as the set warmed up to a steady monochrome glow – with the lucky ones able to tune in to BBC 2. Virgin Media Digital Media Centre Virgin Media Digital Media …
Why aren't we hiring them to run e-everything.gov.uk, and offer really useful online services?
I've always thought: why doesn't <large company or government> just hire Amazon to design and run their web systems?
Whatever you may think of Amazon's business practices, they have by far the most consistently easy to use retail front end anywhere on the 'net.
All this RF-to-IP back to RF again reminds me of the Three Stooges working on the plumbing in the basement. Someday the whole path will be IP from the file or camera to the viewer's display (at least in the advanced economies of the northern hemisphere). That will happen when someone like Google steps in and buys the broadcast rights to the NFL or the Premiere League. Until then, we'll just keep heating the atmosphere w/this archaic RF delivery platform and the cultural shit it requires to fill 750MHz of spectrum
Let me be more specific,HD-SDI (or FC/IP if from a server) -> DVB -> IP -> DVB is ludicrous and both capex/opex wasteful (all those fabrics and transport translators to install and manage). Also, if you don't think that the web will eventually absorb broadcast, then why is Rupert Murdoch so terrified by Google? And it's not only because they have 10x more cash than he does!
Google have millions of android devices which could double as STB's, they've got chromecast and you can bet there are plenty of phone+TV android devices in China.
IP provides a more reliable transport than RF, and allows for caching, so that makes sense. RF is far better than IP for mass distribution so that makes sense too. Until someone gets multicast working well through ISP's not much is going to change there. With Google starting ISP activity in the US, things may begin to move. If anyone has the ability to gather and sell your TV-viewing habits to marketers, its Google. Google can also do "web-scale" authentication which might be handy too.
Google is also not beholden to the content providers and they don't have existing profit margins or business model to protect in this sector which makes them a dangerous competitor. I'd be nervous too if my business depended on the goodwill of my suppliers not to go with a distributor who could provide much better feedback data and who is much larger than me.
There is a VM street cabinet in my front hedge - but I am not a subscriber. At some point in history the lock has been broken. One cable has been trapped in the door hinge and the torn insulation shows inner wires - even bare ones.
Every so often I notice that the door is swinging open in the wind - and I fix it with a daisychain of cable ties round the box. Every time there is an installation change then my cable ties are removed - but in many years they have never fixed the lock.
... You make mention of a 'set top box',
but in all my years of adding gadgets to TV's (VHS, BSB, Astra/Sky, DVD+RW, NTL Digital, Sky digital, Virgin Media PCR, Humax PVR, Xbox/PS3) I have NEVER ONCE either installed my own devices to sit on top of the TV not have any of my friends.
They always go UNDER the TV.
In the age of 'waffer thin' TV's , a SetTop Box is a near impossibility!
NTL/Virgin have done a great job, despite being shafted by BSkyB/NewsInternational IMHO
Set-top box
I think it's an Americanism, and certainly, from my extensive research (watching Simpsons) it would appear that they used to place these devices on top of the television.
However, as you say, in this age of LED widescreens there's not much room to balance the satellite, DVD, VHS, Playstation, XBox and kitchen sink on top anymore...
That the only things that Brittons understand about the USA is from our television shows.
So sorry that's where Britains level of knowledge of the USA is from too.
For reference, most Americans are far more intelligent than the "Simpsons" would depict and 99% of American television is NOT expected to be "educational" or "realistic"! (including our "news".)
Dan, I'm sorry that you failed to understand the tongue-in-cheek nature of my post, and would like to reassure you that I don't think that all Americans are like Homer Simpson.
I've seen Dukes of Hazzard, The A Team, and Dallas, so I know that isn't true...
Oh by the way, most Brittons don't speak with a Cockney accent, or go dancing about on roofs with a chimney sweep's brush either, and nor do we sound like BBC announcers of the fifties.
Just FYI...
;)
Since there is no sarcasm tag or icon here, it is impossible to tell when Brittons are being sarcastic or just being anti-american. The latter is FAR more frequent.
Take yer dang tongue outta yer cheek and get offa my lawn! Whippersnappers the lot of ya.
For the record, and as has been my experience here; a very large percentage of Reg commentards seem to be anti-American by default (Damn downvoting Terrorists anyway) and apparently DO think the Simpsons are an example of the way most Americans act (OOH, Doughnuts, D'oh!). Before the Simpsons, the three TV shows you mentioned (along with most soap operas) are considered to be a bloody European tutorial on how to be an American. Hell, YOU mentioned Dallas, not me, I would have shot JR.
Most of us Americans, at least those in my generation; gave up on the Disney Studios/Dick van Dike representation of the typical Britton when we were nine or ten. Then we followed the Beatles/British Invasion interpretation until The Rolling Stones were in vogue here. And then we got high, and then we got high, etc. When we woke up, most of us really didn't care about the rest of the world. We were too busy dealing with war, life, kids and work. Some of us even stopped making sweeping generalizations about other countries and their people.
Note I said "some of us".
"You won't believe how much goes into today's telly tech"
I realise it's likely the subheading was probably not added by the author, but PLEASE El Reg, stop using brain-dead ''buzzfeedisms".
They are obnoxious, patronising, and part of the dumbing-down culture.
You'll find that the majority of the readership here will 'believe' this article. Further, I'm sure a decent percentage not only believe it, but knew it already.
Please stick to innuendoes, childish humour, and nob jokes, like you do best!
...and a severely broken copyright system which forces/allows TV stations to limit their broadcast area.
Just think how differently radio on the Internet is. Today you can tune into virtually every radio station in the world from wherever you are. It's like shortwave, only often in "better than FM" quality.
We could have the same with television. The step from 128 kbit/s audio to 1024kbit/s video isn't big enough to make it infeasible.
Television used to be different. Back in the 1990s, you just started your TV station and put it onto a satellite. Everybody in Europe could just receive it. Television was a lot more European, it didn't know as many boundaries as it does now. Today when I order "Cartoon Network" in English on my cable company, I get a monstrosity known as "Cartoon Network Deutschland", which has very little to do with the real "Cartoon Network" as it only shows shows which have been dubbed to German... which means that those shows have been shown on other channels for years and are continuously repeated. The result is something more akin to "Pop" than Cartoon Network.
It sounds like the majority of virgin medias content is re-broadcast sky satellite streams, with the exceptions being the direct HDSDI streams form the BBC and probably some other larger broadcast groups (QVC perhaps? Sky.. Unlikely.) There is absolutely no way for one already compressed stream to be decoded, re-encoded, re-encrypted and redistributed in better quality than its source, the very best audio and picture quality they can hope to achieve is "subjectively looks and sounds the same" So I read this as people who care about the picture and audio quality of their TV shouldn't get virgin media.
As a virgin media customer, I can confirm the low picture quality. I see compression artifacts on my 28 inch CRT telly, so christ knows how bad it must look on a modern big screen. Fortunately, the content is so rubbish that I don't mind the low picture quality it is presented in.
...but they have a nuisance mechanism to chuck people off their cable network if they find too much noise coming from a particular source into their street cabs. We had our phone/internet + ondemand services cut off by senior engineers who regularly check cabs. Then normal process is to wait for the customer to call saying their services are offline. After which the home engineer comes down and fixes the issues. Got a £5 rebate on my bill but t'was a tad annoying.
Lovely tech (nice to see how it's all built together) but their customer service needs some what improving to communicate what the hell goes wrong.
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